Jonathan Jones

Romney narrows the gap, but Obama remains the favourite

The question after last week’s presidential debate was not who had won — there was a clear consensus that Mitt Romney had got the better of Barack Obama — but how much difference it would make to the race. Going into the debate on Wednesday night, Obama was the clear favourite to win re-election, with a five-point lead in the polls. Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight forecast gave him an 86 per cent chance of victory. But, thanks to his strong debate performance and the President’s uncharacteristically weak one, Romney has narrowed that gap.

Different polls paint different pictures of exactly what effect the debate had on the race, though most show it moving towards Romney initially before going back slightly in Obama’s direction. Gallup’s tracker found Romney pulling even with Obama at 47-47 in the three days after the debate, from a five-point deficit in the three days leading up to it. Their daily updates are a seven-day average, and so the latest (showing a five-point Obama lead) still includes pre-debate responses, but it does tell us that Obama did better in the polling conducted on the Sunday after the debate than he had on the Sunday before it. Rasmussen’s three-day tracker had shown a 2-point lead for Obama just before the debate, which became a 2-point lead for Romney afterwards — but it now shows the two candidates level-pegging at 48-48. Ipsos had shown Obama up by around five-points before the debate, but its post-debate poll shows Obama’s lead cut to two points. RAND (which like Gallup publishes a seven-day average) has Obama’s lead narrowing only slightly, from five or six points pre-debate to four points now.

But the best number for Romney came yesterday, in a Pew Research poll that showed him four points ahead of Obama.

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